It was 1979 when Hedwig Döbele came to Dresden for the first time on a tourist visa and visited an exhibition by the painter Ernst Hassebrauk in the Albertinum.

"I saw these pictures and was totally enthusiastic," says the art dealer, who a few years earlier had founded a gallery in Ravensburg with her husband - initially for artists from the south-west such as Max Ackermann, HAP Grieshaber or Ida Kerkovius, later also Willi Baumeister, Victor Vasarely and Gunther Uecker.

In Dresden, she quickly made contacts.

"I talked Swabian, that was a door opener back then." Fritz Löffler in particular, the art historian and expert on the urban art scene and author of the monumental work "Das alten Dresden", proved to be a helpful mediator.

Soon there was a Hassebrauk exhibition in the Ravensburger gallery,

Stephen Locke

Correspondent for Saxony and Thuringia based in Dresden.

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The latter was a novelty in the West, since the German art scene had drifted apart after the division of Germany.

While there were still joint exhibitions after the end of the war, politics soon dominated: while the SED forbade artists to cooperate with the "class enemy", the federal government warned West German artists in brochures against "communist infiltration".

Only the basic treaty between the GDR and the FRG brought relief;

now exhibitions and sales of art from the East in the West were also possible.

In 1977, the GDR took part in the documenta art fair for the first time: the Leipzig painters Wolfgang Mattheuer, Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig and Willi Sitte from Halle exhibited their works.

From then on they shaped the image of East German visual artists in the West.

Hedwig Döbele worked constantly to ensure that Dresden, as the most traditional center of fine arts in Germany, was not forgotten.

"The GDR was unimportant to me," she says.

"For me it was all about the pictures, about the culture - that all fascinated me very much."

Döbele also overcame this and soon had the reputation of a "partisan for Dresden".

Until 1989 she showed 23 exhibitions of East German artists in Ravensburg.

Among them were old masters like Wilhelm Rudolph, Albert Wiegand and Curt Querner, but also younger artists like Angela Hampel, Herta Günther Hubertus Giebe and Max Uhlig.

Shortly thereafter, Hedwig Döbele moved her gallery to the Saxon state capital.

It wasn't an economic decision, but a love decision, she says.

However, on the art market of the reunified country, envy and fear of East German competition initially reigned supreme.

Open letters were written, East German painters were defamed as "state artists".

"It was an unbelievably heated atmosphere," says Döbele.

At Art Cologne, where she exhibited “the best Dresden artists” in 1995, the board threatened her in writing with dismissal if she continued to exhibit these pictures – because they “didn’t meet international standards”.

"That was absurd," says Döbele, especially since she never relied on the protagonists of the system, but rather on the rather quiet but strong artists on the fringes.

"We have pictures of London, Paris,

The letter in question is included in the more than two hundred files that Hedwig Döbele gave to the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB) for research.

These include contracts from the German-German art trade, invoices, catalogs and photographs from fairs and vernissages.

The most painful thing for her is the separation from the seventeen guest books from forty years with dedications and drawings by artists and visitors, says Döbele.

"They are like a gallery diary." Katrin Stump, the new general director of the SLUB, described the handover as a "great moment for the library".

Because this is where Döbele's legacy meets the legacies of the very same artists and scene experts with whom she once had dealings.

Hedwig Döbele remained loyal to Dresden for almost three decades,

before she settled down with her husband in Mannheim in 2019.

Here, now 81 years old, she continues to work as a gallery owner for classical modern and post-war art.